Shocking new details of US STD experiments in Guatemala

[seafan]

Source: Guardian (UK)

Shocking new details of US medical experiments done in Guatemala in the 1940s, including a decision to re-infect a dying woman in a syphilis study, have been disclosed by a presidential panel.

The Guatemala experiments are already considered one of the darker episodes of medical research in US history, but panel members say the new information indicates that researchers were unusually unethical, even when placed into the historical context of a different era.

.....

For example, seven women with epilepsy, who were housed at Guatemala's Asilo de Alienados (Home for the Insane), were injected with syphilis below the back of the skull, a risky procedure. The researchers thought the new infection might somehow help cure epilepsy. The women each got bacterial meningitis, probably as a result of the unsterile injections, but were treated.

Perhaps the most disturbing details involved a female syphilis patient with an undisclosed terminal illness. The researchers, curious to see the impact of an additional infection, infected her with gonorrhea in her eyes and elsewhere. Six months later she died.

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/30/guatemala-experiments/print

---

There are just no words.

[jwirr]

1. And the medical profession joins all the other bastards of corruption. nt

We did these kinds of experiments in the USA also - that is one of the reasons I kept my disabled daughter at home for 45 years and why I am poor now. I realize that everyone in the medical profession is not like this but there have been way too many.

[BlueIris]

7. "Joins"? Our healthcare system is completely corrupt.

The misogyny and bigotry know no limits there. Not a new thing, as you obviously know. And while not "everyone in the medical profession" is corrupt to the core, that doesn't excuse the vast majority who are.

[Odin2005]

2. Gastly! Inhuman!

:grr:

[Octafish]

3. Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, TIME cover boy, injected Puerto Ricans with cancer.

June 27, 1949



Details: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=3312956&mesg_id=3327364

[Mnemosyne]

6. Operation Paperclip 'immigrant', perhaps? No words... n/t

[Judi Lynn]

10. Absolutely astonished to read that pure filth from this US medical "researcher."

I have never seen anything that evil, NEVER.

From your link, this jaw-dropping information:

THE PUERTO RICAN CANCER EXPERIMENT

In 1931, Cornelius Rhoads, a North American pathologist at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Investigations in San Juan, carried out a murderous "experiment" in which 13 Puerto Ricans died after being purposely infected with cancer. In a letter to another doctor, leaked to the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Rhoads wrote: "the Porto Ricans are beyond doubt the dirtiest, laziest, most degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere. It makes you sick to inhabit the same island with them.… What the island needs is not public health work, but a tidal wave or something to totally exterminate the population. It might then be liveable. I have done my best to further the process of extermination by killing off eight and transplanting cancer into several more. The latter has not resulted in any fatalities so far.... The matter of consideration for the patients' welfare plays no role here - in fact, all physicians take delight in the abuse and torture of the unfortunate subjects".

When the case was brought to the press by Don Pedro Albizu Campos (the Nationalist Party President), the North American Governor of Puerto Rico had a prosecutor investigate the charge. Rhoads never denied writing the letter, but despite evidence proving that 13 patients had died, eight of whom were treated by Rhoads, the prosecutor exonerated Rhoads, calling him merely "a mentally ill person or a man with few scruples."

However, this "mentally ill person" went on to direct the establishment of US Army chemical warfare laboratories in Maryland, Utah, and the Panama Canal Zone, for which he was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1945. That same year, Rhoads was appointed to the staff of the US Atomic Energy Commission. The Commission was at that time carrying out radiation experiments on unwitting prisoners, hospital patients and soldiers.

Meanwhile, a 1950 Puerto Rican Nationalist insurrection led to the arrest of hundreds of activists, including Don Pedro Albizu. The prisoners later charged they were experimented on with drugs. According to Nationalist Party leaders, Rhoads was finally getting his revenge for Albizu's earlier murder charge. Albizu was denounced by US and local colonial officials as a lunatic, but doctors eventually supported his charges. His health steadily deteriorated, and he died shortly after his release from prison in 1965. Subsequent documents have supported both his original murder charges and his allegations of radiation poisoning.

~~~~~
It does, in spirit, resemble earlier remarks by the U.S. Secretary of War, J. C. Breckenridge, in his Morandum written on Christas Eve, 1898, and it would appear Breckenridge had almost that much filthy hatred for the human race, but simply couldn't articulate his evil nature as "well":

~snip~
The island of Cuba, a larger territory, has a greater population density than Puerto Rico, although it is unevenly distributed. This population is made up of whites, blacks, Asians and people who are a mixture of these races. The inhabitants are generally indolent and apathetic. As for their learning, they range from the most refined to the most vulgar and abject. Its people are indifferent to religion, and the majority are therefore immoral and simultaneously they have strong passions and are very sensual. Since they only possess a vague notion of what is right and wrong, the people tend to seek pleasure not through work, but through violence. As a logical consequence of this lack of morality, there is a great disregard for life.

It is obvious that the immediate annexation of these disturbing elements into our own federation in such large numbers would be sheer madness, so before we do that we must clean up the country, even if this means using the methods Divine Providence used on the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.

We must destroy everything within our cannons’ range of fire. We must impose a harsh blockade so that hunger and its constant companion, disease, undermine the peaceful population and decimate the Cuban army. The allied army must be constantly engaged in reconnaissance and vanguard actions so that the Cuban army is irreparably caught between two fronts and is forced to undertake dangerous and desperate measures.

~snip~
To sum up, our policy must always be to support the weaker against the stronger, until we have obtained the extermination of them both, in order to annex the Pearl of the Antilles.

More:
http://www.historyofcuba.com/history/bmemo.htm

~~~~~
Thanks, so much, for linking that earlier thread. I'm immediately bookmarking it to share, myself. It's a deadly shame if this society doesn't learn about these people who have already had far too much influence in the world. It's time to back away from whatever has been creating this filth. Immediately.

[NM Independent]

4. What they are glossing over is the true lesson of this story.

People are acting as if humanity has moved beyond justifying the means by the ends. They are acting as if this is something awful, but contained safely in a history of ignorance.

We have not changed. The ends are still used to justify the means. Maybe not so much in the medical community anymore, but the ethos of modern humanity leaves much to be desired.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Americans knew drug tests were unethical

Americans knew drug tests were unethical
August 31, 2011

WASHINGTON: At least 83 people died as human guinea pigs in macabre US research on sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala in the 1940s, a commission ordered by President Barack Obama concluded.

The commission said US government researchers must have known they were contravening ethical standards by deliberately infecting mental patients with syphilis.

Commission president Amy Gutmann called it an “historic injustice,” and said the inquiry aimed to “honour the victims and make sure it never happens again.”

“It was not an accident that this happened in Guatemala,” Gutmann said. “Some of the people involved said we could not do this in our own country.”

~snip~
The Guatemalan president has called the 1946-1948 experiments conducted by the US National Institutes of Health “crimes against humanity” and ordered his own investigation.

More:
http://gulftoday.ae/portal/6ee0a66c-4b9e-414a-a2d9-3837c1d27cf9.aspx

[jwirr]

8. Brings up the question of what we must be doing in places like Africa.

It is inhuman and should be a war crime or at least equivalent to a war crime.

[Harmony Blue]

9. It is a crime against humanity no doubt

Question is who will stand up and state the obvious to the American people who remain oblivious to the horrors our nation commits on a daily basis?

[Judi Lynn]

11. This American confession is an insult to GuatemalaThe attitude of the US establishment to central Am

This American confession is an insult to Guatemala
The attitude of the US establishment to central America has barely changed since the syphilitic atrocity of 1946-8
Hugh O'Shaughnessy guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 31 August 2011 22.30 BST

The commission called in by President Obama to investigate American involvement in the deliberate infection of Guatemalans with sexually transmitted diseases has reported its interim findings. The case concerns 5,500 Guatemalans who were the subject of "medical research" that took place with US collaboration between 1946 and 1948: 1,300 were deliberately exposed to sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis, gonorrhoea or chancroid.

Dr Amy Gutmann, a US university president who led the investigation, said some of the staff involved were "grievously wrong" and "morally culpable to various degrees". I note however that the implication that some were not "grievously wrong" and others were only partially guilty.

To be frank, the labours of President Obama's commission and Dr Gutmann's carefully nuanced statement would be laughable if they were not so insulting. They appear a sort of political legerdemain that, by offering a confession to one crime, is seeking to divert attention and escape responsibility for an infinitely greater one.

What happened with the syphilitic atrocity between 1946 and 1948 was as nothing when compared with the US involvement in cataclysmic genocide of 200,000 people visited on Guatemala – and particularly on the Mayans and other indigenous peoples – when that country was under the heel of military dictatorships fostered, encouraged and supported by Washington.

More:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/31/insult-guatemala-syphilitic-atrocity

[Name removed]

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[unkachuck]

13. "There are just no words."

....sure there are; like Harmony Blue stated: crimes against humanity

[Judi Lynn]

14. Scientists hid fatal sex tests in Guatemala but sought approval in US

Scientists hid fatal sex tests in Guatemala but sought approval in US
Rob Stein
September 3, 2011.


US GOVERNMENT researchers who purposely infected subjects with sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala in the 1940s had conducted similar experiments a few years earlier in Indiana but had obtained permission, investigators said.

The contrast between how the US Public Health Service scientists experimented with Americans and Guatemalans showed that researchers knew their conduct was unethical, members of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which is investigating the experiment, said this week.

The commission found that 1300 people were exposed to the sexually transmitted diseases syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid and that at least 83 people had died.


Scientists hid fatal sex tests in Guatemala but sought approval in US Rob Stein
September 3, 2011
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US GOVERNMENT researchers who purposely infected subjects with sexually transmitted diseases in Guatemala in the 1940s had conducted similar experiments a few years earlier in Indiana but had obtained permission, investigators said.

The contrast between how the US Public Health Service scientists experimented with Americans and Guatemalans showed that researchers knew their conduct was unethical, members of the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, which is investigating the experiment, said this week.

The commission found that 1300 people were exposed to the sexually transmitted diseases syphilis, gonorrhea and chancroid and that at least 83 people had died.

In one case, a woman who was infected with syphilis was clearly dying from the disease, but instead of treating her, the researchers poured gonorrhea-infected pus into her eyes and other orifices and infected her again with syphilis. She died six months later.

More:
http://www.theage.com.au/world/scientists-hid-fatal-sex-tests-in-guatemala-but-sought-approval-in-us-20110902-1jq2m.html

[Judi Lynn]

15. Guatemala, the United States’ Field Laboratory

Guatemala, the United States’ Field Laboratory
By Jacobo G. García
Translated By Camden Luxford
31 August 2011
Edited by Jen­nifer Pietropaoli

Spain - El Mundo - Original Article (Spanish)

The first objective was, apparently, to find a poor country without public institutions or health services where a man with an American accent, white coat and stethoscope around his neck could work freely under the pretense that he’d arrived to heal. It was the 1940s, and Guatemala was the ideal location.

One by one, prostitutes were chosen, preferably those with many clients and few scruples. Later, the soldiers, the poor, orphans, the mentally ill, the indigenous, and so on. Hundreds and hundreds of people became victims of an experiment designed in U.S. laboratories and tested among the lowest and most miserable of Guatemalans.

In total, as was publicized Monday, 1,300 people were infected between 1946 and 1948 in a massive experiment. Behind this experiment was the U.S. Department of Health and the sinister Dr. John Cutler, who was also famous in Alabama for having used hundreds of black men as guinea pigs in the so-called “Tuskegee” experiment, in which more than a hundred people died.

“A Monstrosity,” declared Tuesday’s headlines in Guatemala’s most important newspaper, Prensa Libre, on being informed of the details of the experiment in which 5,500 patients were deceived, 1,300 infected, 83 dead. The women were injected with syphilis and gonorrhea in the arm; the men, in the penis.

More:
http://watchingamerica.com/News/119045/guatemala-the-united-states-field-laboratory/

[Judi Lynn]

16. US Doctors Infected Hundreds of Guatemalans with Syphilis–And Concealed the Evidence

US Doctors Infected Hundreds of Guatemalans with Syphilis–And Concealed the Evidence

Last fall, it came to light that researchers had infected 700 Guatemalan soldiers, prisoners, and mental patients with syphilis in a US Public Health Service study between 1946 and 1948. The American government apologized for these “abhorrent” practices, and promised to investigate what had happened. A White House bioethics commission released its report on the study this Tuesday—and as horrific as the experiments sounded initially, the full story is even worse.

The studies were approved by an astonishing list of government, military, and academic public health and legal experts, the report shows, including the surgeon general; this was sanctioned, government-backed research, not a couple scientists going rogue. The researchers performed diagnostic tests on a total of 5,500 people, the report notes, and infected a total of 1,300, including schoolchildren, with syphilis and other sexually transmitted infections. The report also details evidence that the researchers knew this work wasn’t ethically above board, including the publication of the Nuremberg Code governing medical ethics in 1947, and the fact that they’d asked for subjects’ informed consent in a similar study in the US, but did not do so in Guatemala. “They thought that they were above the rules, and went to some lengths to shield themselves from normal institutionally imposed scrutiny,” the committee wrote . Perhaps most chilling are the details the report gleans from the researchers’ own notes, such as the scientists’ disappointment at not being able to surreptitiously infect women during routine exams, the use of needles on multiple patients without sterilization, and anecdotes of patients who fled or resisted infection.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/09/14/us-doctors-infected-hundreds-of-guatemalans-with-syphilis-and-concealed-the-evidence/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiscoverHealthMedicine+%28Discover+Health+%26+Medicine%29